WIREDGOV

Sport England and Facebook have announced a new partnership that will transform the way sports bodies engage with participants as they deliver a lasting Olympic legacy of one million people playing more sport.

The new partnership, which will help national governing bodies (NGBs) to reach out beyond their traditional club structures, was launched at a mass table tennis event in London, organised through Facebook.

It’s the first long-term collaboration between Facebook and a government or public body in the U.K. – and will use the social networking site’s unrivalled influence to bring people together around sport in the run up to London 2012.

Central to this new way of working is the new Facebook ‘Sport Hub’ which enables NGBs to engage with over 20 million people who use Facebook in the UK. The ‘Hub’ looks and feels like a Facebook fan page but offers a range of new applications, enabling NGBs to organise and market grassroots sports events. Facebook users are able to challenge other people in their area to compete against them – whether in a squash match or a running race – and then share the results with their Facebook friends and networks.

“Sport England’s partnership with Facebook will fundamentally change the way sports engage with participants,” said Richard Lewis, Sport England’s Chair. “It will help NGBs to reach out beyond existing club structures to the young people who are the future of sport. Four out of five youngsters have a Facebook account, so this is a key way for us to make sport a part of more people’s lives.”

The partnership is worth up to £20 million, with Facebook providing an in-kind investment of £5 million a year until March 2013.

Students and young people who use Facebook are the first to benefit though a pilot scheme run by British Universities & Colleges Sport (BUCS) and six sports:

• Table tennis
• Squash and racketball
• Badminton
• Judo
• Athletics
• Volleyball.

The pilot has an ambitious target to get 12,000 students participating in sport in just four months. Sport England’s commercial team is already talking to a wide range of NGBs in order to expand the use of the Sport Hub.

"We want to get more people more active on campus,” said Karen Rothery, Chief Executive of BUCS. “Freshers' week is an ideal time for new and returning students to join sports clubs and try new activities that could last throughout their time at university. By promoting innovative sporting activities through the Facebook Sport Hub, we believe we can challenge many more young people to get involved in sport socially and self-organise local events, taking sport to the very heart of the student experience."

“Millions of people in the UK are already using Facebook to connect to their friends and organise events around things that matter to them, including sport,” said Blake Chandlee, Facebook’s Vice-President of Sales, EMEA. “By cleverly leveraging Facebook’s tools and advertising programmes to get more people into sport, Sport England is using our social tool as a tool for social change.”

Sport England is working to attract £50 million of commercial value into grassroots sport by 2013. Facebook is the first of a number of top level partnerships which we aim to create over the next four years.

You can find out more about the table tennis event at Kings College London by visiting its Facebook page

If you would like to know how your NGB can use the new Sport Hub, please contact Mike Billing in the Sport England commercial team.